Homemade Pasta

Pasta is, in my opinion, the perfect comfort food. Tasty, warm, familiar carbs - what's not to love, right? I'm fairly certain I could eat pasta for the rest of my life and die happy - although I could say the same thing about Mexican food... thank goodness I don't have to choose between the two!

Now, the only way to make a good thing better is to make it yourself. Enter homemade pasta!!! Yes, I know this sounds fancy, but it's really a lot easier than it sounds (unless you want to make ravioli - then it's pretty much as hard as it sounds, but that's another story!) Basically, I throw a few simple ingredients into my food processor to make the dough, then I roll it out. I'm not too fussy about how it looks so I use my pizza slicer to quickly slice it into strips and voila! Home made pasta, ready to be boiled.  

 See? This is what I end up with! It looks sort of like... well, I ate this for dinner so on second thought, let's not go there. Anyhow, I had a it with more zucchini and a white wine lemon cream sauce... yum. But I'm pretty sure I could have eaten a big bowl of these noodles covered in butter and it still would have been divine!

Recipe

Homemade Pasta

3 eggs
2 cups flour
pinch of salt
2 tsp olive oil
water as needed

Add eggs to a food processor (or mixer, or you could just use a bowl and a fork but I like my kitchen power tools!) and quickly pulse to mix. Add flour, salt, and oil, and process until the ingredients are mixed. If your dough begins to stick together to form a ball, you're all set. If not, add a bit of water wile processing until the dough sticks together. It should be fairly "tough" and hard to mix if you're doing it by hand. Allow the dough to rest, covered, for 30 minutes (or while you get whatever sauce you're making together... or, if you have my bad luck, while you run back to the store to return the spoiled cream that you just bought an hour ago!)

After the dough has rested, take one third and begin rolling. You can do this either with a rolling pin, or with a pasta roller like this. You can make it as thick or thin as you like - I would recommend leaving it thicker (1/8 of an inch) if you're using a heavy sauce but thin (as thin as you like before the dough gets too fragile to work with) for a lighter sauce. Cut the resulting sheet of pasta as desired, toss in flour, and set aside. Repeat with the rest of the dough.

While you're rolling out the pasta, put a large pot of salted water on to boil. You may be surprised by how much the pasta expands, so really be sure to give yourself enough space. Add the pasta to the boiling water and allow to cook for about 5 minutes, depending on the thickness. Drain and toss with a bit of olive oil to prevent sticking, and enjoy!